AWS acquires DuckLabs to scale open-source data engine

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the acquisition of DuckLabs, the company responsible for the DuckDB in-process OLAP data management system. The deal is expected to become effective in early September 2026, marking a significant shift for the bootstrapped venture that was founded just over five years ago.

DuckLabs, which has grown to a team of more than 30 people in Amsterdam, chose a bootstrapped path to maintain control over the project’s direction. The company stated that joining AWS provides the resources and reach to bring the technology to a broader audience, addressing concerns that its small size could become a bottleneck for the project’s rapid growth.

To reassure the developer community, AWS has committed to keeping DuckDB, DuckLake, and Quack free and open source under the MIT licence. The nonprofit DuckDB Foundation will continue to steward these projects, ensuring that the core IP remains independent of the parent company. The DuckLabs team will remain together in Amsterdam, allowing them to focus on technical development while leveraging AWS’s infrastructure.

The partnership follows more than a year of close collaboration between the two entities. AWS Distinguished Engineer and Vice President Andy Warfield noted that DuckDB is already broadly used and loved by S3 customers, with the system seeing more than one million downloads every day. Warfield described the DuckLabs team as technically deep and high-velocity, expressing confidence in their combined ability to expand the project’s impact.

Structural changes are also planned to maintain community trust. The DuckDB Foundation will include a technical advisory board to guide the project’s direction, and the extension stack will be opened to allow extensions signed by other developers and organisations to run within DuckDB. This move aims to preserve the vendor-neutral nature of the open data stack.

Peter Boncz, a board member of the DuckDB Foundation and database architectures group lead at CWI Amsterdam, welcomed the development. He stated that the foundation holds all IP of open-source DuckDB and anticipates that AWS’s commitment will accelerate innovation. The acquisition is seen as a way to support the continued development of DuckDB for the long term, allowing the team to tackle harder problems at a scale previously unattainable.